What’s the CX buzz this week? (1st Dec, 2014)

This week’s CX Buzz is all about metrics. How do you track your employees, your customers, even the processes you have in place within your company? Within the contact center, managers are increasingly tracking their employees’ performance. But are they measuring the right things? Perhaps they are undermining their employees by failing to communicate or have shoddy management processes? Similarly, when it comes to tracking customers, big data is both an opportunity and a threat. Do it right, and you will win customers’ loyalty without stoking privacy fears. Read on for tips on how to achieve the right balance.

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Imagine a customer who walks into a clothing store and asks an associate, “Do you have a blue sweater in size medium?” Now imagine the sales associate returning a blank stare and saying nothing.

The sales associate who fails to help an eager customer would probably not keep her job for very long. Unfortunately, in contact centers, these scenarios happen more often than you think.

Even though a contact center agent does not interact with customers face-to-face, there are three metrics you can use to assess their job performance. The first issue is resolution. Was the customer’s issue resolved? The second is whether or not the agent’s product/policy knowledge was adequate or better than adequate. Finally, does the agent offer to complete a transaction?

With the growth in e-commerce, it’s time to think about the contact center as a sales channel, says the author. Read this article in full to get some important facts and figures on the topic. Needless to say, there is much room for improvement.

More and more companies are seeking to track their employees’ performance when it comes to creating great customer experiences.

Author Kimberly Abel says that’s fine, but before you track your employees, you have to meet two prerequisites: You must communicate (over and over) that customer service is a top priority, and, second, you must clear the roadblocks to providing great customer service.

This sounds pretty straightforward, but in reality, even this baseline standard often goes unmet. For instance, you often hear a recording that “your call is important to us,” and then hold the line for 20 minutes. Often, it’s less about the performance of any particular employee than the organizational processes in place, to enable customer satisfaction and service quality.

The author of this piece, David Evans, reminisces about what call centers were like in the 1980’s.

He recalls how back then, Work Force Management (WFM) technology had just emerged. Today, thirty years later, WFM is very much seen as a must-have technology for the multi-channel contact center. It’s a mature and widely used product that has come a long way from the, single-channel scheduling tool it once was.

For instance, in the early days, WFM applications were the preserve of large enterprises. WFM was expensive and considered a niche product, very technical, not user friendly, with limited data connections. It could take a feed of call data to work out a forecast, but the creation of schedules was laborious and time consuming.

This article will prove fascinating to those involved in the day-to-day work of WFM in contact centers. It describes in great detail the evolution of software products and how far we have come today.

So how do you figureout the “job” your customers need done? The traditional way is to observe them through ethnographic research. But ethnographic research is expensive and limited. The latest developments in big data and opinion mining technologies, combined with growing availability of customer experience testaments available online, offer new opportunities for uncovering unmet customer needs on a market scale.

The author, Drew McLellan, points out that every day our digital activity (on the web, on our smart phones, social networks, etc.) creates over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. In fact, 90% of all the data in the world today has been created in the last two years.

The huge data trail most of us are leaving will help businesses get to know us better, anticipate our needs and provide real-time service.

However, tracking people’s preferences in this way is a trend, says McLellan, which means it isn’t mainstream yet. And the truth is, says McLellan, most consumers, (especially Millennials) expect you to use their data to service their needs. Some people will be uncomfortable that you know so much, but that will dissipate. As long as you are transparent, and explain what digital data you are collecting and why, you and your customers can greatly benefit from the big data trend.

We hope you enjoyed our picks and bookmarked a few of these articles for future reference. Please don’t forget to share the buzz with other CX professionals.

Are there any other topics of CX that interest you? Tweet us, or comment below to let us know!

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